Letter 585: Will you never stop treating trifles as treasures and worthless things as priceless?
To Bacchius. (357)
Will you never cease thinking small things great, and reckoning things of no worth to be worth a great deal? But if I utter anything, this is at once something solemn in your eyes, and you seek it and long for it, and you reproach me for your not yet having received it.
You always did seem to me to be in love with the poorer part of what is ours, but now you are no less than ever in earnest about trifles. You will know, however, if you receive it -- and you will receive it before long -- that what you say has won renown among you is a shadow of a speech rather than a speech.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.
Latin / Greek Original
Βακχίῳ. (357)
Οὐ παύσῃ ποτὲ τὰ μικρὰ μεγάλα νομίζων καὶ πολλοῦ
τινος ἄξια τὰ μηδενός; ἀλλ’ ἂν φθέγξωμαί τι, σεμνὸν εὐθὺς
τοῦτο παρὰ σοὶ καὶ ζητεῖς καὶ ποθεῖς καὶ τὸ μήπω λαβεῖν
ἐγκαλεῖς.
ἀεὶ μὲν οὖν μοι φαύλων ἐρᾶν ἐφαίνου τῶν ἡμε-
τέρων ἐρῶν, νῦν δ’ οὐχ ἥκιστα σπουδάζειν περὶ μικρά. γνώσῃ
δέ, ἢν λάβῃς, λήψῃ δὲ οὐκ εἰς μακράν, ὡς οὗ κλέος εἰς ὑμᾶς
ἀφῖχθαι λέγεις, σκιὰ λόγου μᾶλλόν ἐστιν ἢ λόγος.
Revision history
- 2026-05-27v2.2.34-import
Initial corpus import from modern libanius retranslated v1.
Fields: letter text, metadata, source links. Source: https://github.com/OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek/blob/master/volume_xml/libanius_10.xml
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